1.5

Trying to create an employee schedule--especially when many of your employees are part time or have limited availability--can be an especially infuriating puzzle. ABC Roster is an easy-to-use program that can take at least some of the hassle out of this important managerial task.

The program's interface is attractive and fairly intuitive, with an optional wizard that can walk you through the steps of creating a schedule for the first time. We were surprised by the number of features that ABC Roster has; you can assign skill levels to each employee and set the minimum average skill level per … Read more

TransTools, or Translator Tools, adds a useful set of free translation-related utilities to Microsoft Word, Excel, and Visio and Autodesk AutoCAD. It speeds up translations, checks to see that translations are complete, localizes numbers, and performs other useful functions from inside these powerful applications.

TransTools installed itself in our copy of Word by default, but we could check boxes to install it inside Excel, Visio, and AutoCAD. We clicked Add-Ins on Word's toolbar and selected the TransTools menu. From this menu, we could perform a Language Check, including finding and removing highlighted words. We could also replace multiple items … Read more

JPEGsnoop is a free image decoder that wrings every drop of data that can be extracted from JPEG images. It's compact and fully portable, so you can take it along with you on a USB drive or other memory device and run it from any compatible Windows machine without having to install it. It can open not just JPEGs but also AVI, DNG, PDF, and THM files, and it also extracts embedded JPEG files. As for the data it extracts, we didn't know that JPEGs contained so much information.

We extracted JPEGsnoop's compressed download and opened the … Read more

JB Music Catalog is a personal database for music lovers and collectors. It catalogs your CDs, LPs, tapes, MP3s, and more with a level of detail few other databases can match at any price, yet it's also freeware. It's highly customizable in its look, layout, and properties. It incorporates a music player and can generate detailed reports and discographies, too.

To open JB Music Catalog, you must first create a new catalog or open an existing catalog. We created a new catalog, which involves either changing or accepting the default name and directory in Explorer. The program opened … Read more

Media players are a dime a dozen, which makes it hard for them to stand out from the crowd. Media Player Classic Home Cinema is another contender in the category, but its glitchy performance failed to impress us enough to make the switch from our current player.

The program's user interface is as basic as it gets, which isn't a bad thing. A menu runs across the top of the window, offering navigational options: File, View, Play, Navigate, Favorites, and Help. A bar with buttons for playing, pausing, stopping, and skipping forward and backward resides at the bottom … Read more

Desktop Ticker is a free scrolling RSS feed display that you can place anywhere on the desktop for an unobtrusive yet instantly accessible and highly customizable news crawl. It's easy to use yet offers lots of options. It can follow news, stocks, and pretty much any other feed you can subscribe to.

Desktop Ticker's small dock-style interface resembles a ticker tape, only with small directional arrows at either end for quickly scrolling forward and back and, on the right, an icon to minimize the display and close the program. A left-side menu has three entries: File, for managing … Read more

Adore Puzzle is an interesting combination of virtual picture puzzles and visual travelogue. It depicts historic scenes and attractive views of the countries of the Western European seaboard, beginning in England and progressing through France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal. Each puzzle has two modes: Puzzle, in which the pieces can be moved to any position, and Slide, which works like a slider puzzle where players must slide squares around to form the picture. The puzzles get progressively harder as you travel, and the game keeps track of your moves and time.

Adore Puzzle is a substantial download, and … Read more

We've all stood and waited while an inexperienced cashier calls in a supervisor to void a charge or enter a discount in a point-of-sale system that would be more at home in Mission Control than Corner Drugs. The Corner Store application has Mom and Pop in mind. It's a POS system specifically for small retailers, so it's designed to be as easy to use as possible. It supports bar code scanning, cash register hot keys, and customer tracking. Most importantly, it supports secure credit card transactions via major national services.

Corner Store POS uses Microsoft .NET Framework … Read more

Online banking has been one of the Internet's greatest conveniences, eliminating not just tons of paper but also delays, lag time, and errors. What could be better, you say? Well, electronic bank and credit card statements could be more useful. ProperSoft's Bank2CSV is a free utility that converts your electronic bank and credit card statements from the OFX, QFX, QIF, QBO, and OFC formats used by programs such as QuickBooks, Quicken, and Microsoft Money into spreadsheet-compatible Comma Separated Value (CSV) files that are compatible with Microsoft Excel, OpenOffice.org, and other spreadsheets.

Bank2CSV's simple, dialog-based interface is … Read more